When Did God Begin?

Hey Andy, what came first, God, or the Holy Spirit? Were they one all the time from the beginning? Also, Jesus wasn’t there at all until later on, right? Did God know Jesus was the option?

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Hi, great questions! Let me see if I can break these down and answer them individually:

All of God came first. See, God is a being of 3 parts: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. All 3 parts are 1 God (1 God, not 3). We can’t understand this because we’ve never experienced anything in our understanding. We only know ourselves as 1-part beings:

Humans = 1 person in 1

God = 3 persons in 1

It’s beyond our understanding, so there’s no question to why we continue to ask about Him. Sure, some may say we’re 2-part beings because we have spirits, but our Spirit is connected to our bodies in that the Body can’t function without the spirit (also, the Bible says that just as Jesus was resurrected – body and all – our bodies will one day be resurrected, also). But with God, all 3 parts function as 1 – individually and combined. Again, something we can’t understand, I know.

That’s another thing we can’t understand because again, there’s nothing like it in our existence other than God.

For us, eternity is something that goes on into the future with no end – but it had to have a beginning, right? So our understanding of eternity is like this:

God’s eternity never began and will never end. It blows the mind when we try to think of it though because it doesn’t make any sense, so far as our understanding goes.

Now, the 3rd part of your question:

Jesus is “God the Son” (the 2nd part of the Trinity of God), so He has always been around, also. His first arrival on the scene as we know Him is when He was born in the flesh some 2000 and some-odd years ago. However, John 1 tells us that everything that exists was created by God the Son (a.k.a. Jesus). We also see Him appear all throughout the Old Testament (a.k.a. the Hebrew Scriptures) as “the Angel of the Lord”. There are several reasons that point to it being Him, but one is that when people received Him, they worshiped Him. But Revelation, whenever John bowed down to the angel, the angel freaked out and rebuked John for doing so because it wasn’t God, but just an angel – a servant of God like John. So if the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament was just an angel, and not God the Son, then it too would have “freaked out” and rebuked the person doing it – but He didn’t. Some of the titles give Him away, also, but that’s for another time.